Block 7: Equity & Displacement: The Perspective Planning Ignores

What today is about

Who gets displaced when a neighborhood intensifies? Planning often skips the question.

Optimization rewards the plan that scores well on housing, access, heat, and flood. It says nothing about the people who lose their homes to get those scores. Today centers the perspective that planning, and a scoring tool, both tend to leave out: informal settlements, affordability, and displacement. The uncomfortable truth this block makes you face is that a redesign which raises every objective by clearing the people already living there has not solved the neighborhood's problem. It has moved the problem onto them.

This is the same discipline you practiced in Unit 5, where a credible Position Paper had to represent a stakeholder fairly instead of arguing past them. Here the stakeholder is the resident your optimization is quietest about: the family in the settlement your high-density block sits on, the tenants priced out when walkability raises rents, the street vendor whose corner became a parklet. "More housing" is not the same as housing them. Naming who your plan costs, and doing something concrete about it, is what turns a clever allocation into a defensible one.

The Equity & Resilience Partner is central today. Its job is to ask the question your scores do not: who does this serve, and who pays? But it is a partner, not an oracle, and it can drift into opposing all change. Push back when it does, log it, and remember the goal is a plan that adds homes without erasing people, not a plan that builds nothing.